Current and anticipated thermal pollution regulations will prevent
many new steam electric power plants from operating with once-through
cooling. Alternative cooling systems acceptable from an environmental
view fail to operate with the same efficiencies, in terms of resources
consumed per Kwh of electricity produced, offered by once-through
cooling systems. As a consequence there are clear conflicts between
meeting environmental objectives and meeting minimum cost and minimum
resource consumption objectives. This report examines, at both the
regional and national level, the costs of satisfying environmental objec-
tives through the existing thermal pollution regulations.
This study forecasts the costs of operating those megawatts of
new generating capacity to be installed between the years 1975 and 2000
which will be required to install closed cycle cooling solely to
comply with thermal regulations. A regionally disaggregated approach
is used in the forecasts in order to preserve as much of the anticipated
inter-regional variation in future capacity growth rates and economic
trends as possible. The net costs of closed cycle cooling over once-
through cooling are based on comparisons of the costs of owning and
operating optimal closed and open-cycle cooling configurations in
separate regions, using computer codes to simulate joint power plant/
cooling system operation. The expected future costs of current thermal
pollution regulations are determined for the mutually exclusive -
collectively exhaustive eighteen Water Resources Council Regions within
the contiguous U.S., and are expressed in terms of additional dollar
expenditures, water losses and energy consumption. These costs are then
compared with the expected resource commitments associated with the
normal operation of the steam electric power industry. It is found that
while energy losses appear to be small, the dollar costs could threaten
the profitability of those utility systems which have historically used
once-through cooling extensively throughout their system. In addition
the additional water demands of closed cycle cooling are likely to disrupt
the water supplies in those coastal areas having few untapped freshwater
supplies available.

Description:

Originally published as the author's thesis (M.S.), M.I.T., Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1979.